Jim Manzi has a long blog post today about the Oregon Medicaid study that got so much attention when it was released a couple of weeks ago. Along the way, I think he mischaracterizes my conclusions, but I’m going to skip that for now. Maybe I’ll get to it later. Instead, I want to make a very focused point about this paragraph of his:

When interpreting the physical health results of the Oregon Experiment, we either apply a cut-off of 95% significance to identify those effects which will treat as relevant for decision-making, or we do not. If we do apply this cut-off…then we should agree with the authors’ conclusion that the experiment “showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years.” If, on the other hand, we wish to consider non-statistically-significant effects, then we ought to conclude that the net effects were unattractive, mostly because coverage induced smoking, which more than offset the risk-adjusted physical health benefits provided by the incremental utilization of health services.

I agree that we should either use the traditional 95 percent confidence or we shouldn’t, and if we do we should use it for all of the results of the Oregon study. The arguments for and against a firm 95 percent cutoff can get a little tricky, but in this case I’m willing to accept the 95 percent cutoff, and I’m willing to use it consistently.

But here’s what I very much disagree with. Many of the results of the Oregon study failed to meet the 95 percent standard, and I think it’s wrong to describe this as showing that “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years.”

To be clear: it’s fine for the authors of the study to describe it that way. They’re writing for fellow professionals in an academic journal. But when you’re writing for a lay audience, it’s seriously misleading. Most lay readers will interpret “significant” in its ordinary English sense, not as a term of art used by statisticians, and therefore conclude that the study positively demonstrated that there were no results large enough to care about.

But that’s not what the study showed. A better way of putting it is that the study “drew no conclusions about the impact of Medicaid on measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years.” That’s it. No conclusions. If you’re going to insist on adhering to the 95 percent standard—which is fine with me—then that’s how you need to describe results that don’t meet it.

Next up is a discussion of why the study showed no statistically significant results. For now, I’ll just refer you back to this post. The short answer is: it was never in the cards. This study was almost foreordained not to find statistically significant results from the day it was conceived.

Whenever you talk about smart machines taking all our jobs, the usual pushback is that you’re being a Luddite—an argument that’s especially appropriate this year since it’s the 200th anniversary of the end of the Luddite movement. (Well, the 200th anniversary of the trial and conviction of the alleged ringleaders, anyway.) The basic argument is that all those skilled weavers in 1813 thought that power looms would put them out of jobs, but they were right only in the most limited way. In the long run, those power looms raised standards of living so much that everyone found jobs somewhere else (working in steel mills, building cars, operating power looms, etc.). So there was nothing to worry about after all.

But the Digital Revolution won’t be a rerun of the Industrial Revolution. I take a crack at explaining this in “Welcome, Robot Overlords,” and it turns out that Karl Smith was an easy sell because he already believes the same thing. Here’s his take:

Creating things is a matter of rearranging atoms. Broadly speaking, you need two things to do this — a power system to overcome the gravitational and electromagnetic forces that tend to hold atoms in their relative positions and a control system to guarantee that atoms wind up in the right place.

The industrial revolution was about one thing — more power! But, more power means the need for more control. Hence, the Industrial Revolution meant a rapid increase in the demand for human brains, not decrease.

Smart machines provide both the power system and the control system in one convenient package. You can still argue that displaced humans will end up doing something else—we just don’t know what yet—but it’s a tough argument to win. If you agree that artificial intelligence will be real someday soon, then by definition smart machines will be able to do just about anything that humans can do. The answer to “Humans will do X,” for any value of X, is “But robots can do that too.” That wasn’t true of the Industrial Revolution.

If you don’t believe that AI is around the corner, then there’s no argument to have here (aside from why you think AI is so far off). But if you do, then we have some serious questions to ponder about the future of work, the future of money, and the future of democracy. That’s what my piece is mainly about.

Peter Kirsanow thinks that L’Affaire IRS (501gate? Cincygate? Teagate?) should be thoroughly investigated. I’m on board with that. But Kirsanow wants to go further. Much, much further:

But the investigation shouldn’t be limited to the IRS. Until last week, the IRS was denying that conservatives were being targeted by the agency. Now we know those denials were completely false. What about the Department of Labor, or for that matter, any federal agency with authority to investigate, regulate, or fine individuals and businesses? With few exceptions, the permanent bureaucracy in Washington leans heavily left. If IRS employees could target conservatives, what prevents the same mindset from prevailing in other agencies?

Congress must use its time and resources judiciously. But it would be shortsighted not to take seriously the complaints that citizens — regardless of ideology — have made about other agencies as well. Hey, we conservatives might be paranoid. But it looks like this time someone was, indeed, out to get us.

Good idea. This could be an excellent WPA-style works program, and it’s one that Republicans in Congress would be willing to fund generously. I recommend a citizen investigating force of at least 3 million drawn from all walks of life. There’s no sense in thinking small here.

From former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, on the endless speculations about what the military could have done to stop the Benghazi attacks:

It’s sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces.

I guess Gates is no longer on Darrell Issa’s Christmas card list. But if you want to know just how cartoonish most of this stuff has been, consider the infamous “stand down” theory. This is the suggestion that there were military forces available to send to Benghazi, but they were told by President Obama to stand down. The motivation for this is always murky, but presumably based on political considerations of some kind.

But the real giveaway about this whole thing is that it keeps changing whenever it’s debunked. Originally, the story retailed by Charles Woods, the father of Benghazi victim Tyrone Woods, revolved around the notion that Obama had a live video feed of Benghazi and refused to let a fast-response team deploy even though he knew they could get there in time. That wasn’t true, so another story developed that General Carter Ham was ready to send in a team, received an order to stand down, and was going to disobey orders and send them in anyway. But then his second in command apprehended him and told him that he was now relieved of duty. That wasn’t true either. So then we got a story about a team in Tripoli that Obama refused to deploy. Then a story about a C-110 team in Croatia that could have gone in but wasn’t allowed to. And finally, last week, a different story about a different team in Tripoli that could have gone in the next morning but didn’t.

In other words, “stand down” has referred to at least five different things over the past several months. It doesn’t matter if any of it is true. It doesn’t matter if Obama was involved. It doesn’t matter why the military made the decisions it did. If one story falls, there’s always another “stand down” conspiracy theory to take its place. Cartoonish indeed.

Robots! That’s the topic of my latest piece in the current issue of the magazine. I’ve blogged on this subject a fair amount, but this is the first time I’ve tried to put everything together and explain what I really think robotics is likely to mean over the next few decades. Some of you are going to nod right along, some of you are going to think I’m crazy, and any economists in the audience are going to be rolling their eyes at my rather casual use of macroeconomic trend statistics to help make my point. But I’m pretty sure none of you will be bored.

So what is my point? First off, it’s the obvious one that I think computer hardware and software are progressing fast enough that we’re not very far away from true artificial intelligence. Along the way I break exciting new ground in describing Ray Kurzweil’s “back half of the chessboard” analogy, which illustrates how continuous growth can look insignificant for a long time and then suddenly explode. After immense amounts of research, I decided on Lake Michigan as the key to my explanation of the chessboard analogy, but you’ll have to click the link to see what this means. It even comes with a nifty little graphic that our art department created to illustrate how Lake Michigan is just like a digital computer.

Why spend so much time on all of this? Because whenever the subject of AI comes up, everyone wants examples but people like me can’t come up with any. That’s because AI doesn’t exist yet. So we haul out Watson and driverless cars and so forth, and it all seems like pretty weak tea. But Lake Michigan explains why it’s not. All these examples that seem pretty lame and not really very AI-like are exactly what you’d expect as mileposts along the road to AI. They aren’t demonstrations of how far away we are, but exactly the opposite. They’re demonstrations of how close we are. When this all finally happens, it’s going to happen fast.

That’s the first half of the piece. The second half is about what all this means. If AI is coming—and coming quickly—what does it mean for the economy? In the long run, it will be great, an era of both infinite leisure and material progress. But in the medium run I think the consequences will be fairly grim: more and more people will be put out of work, and no, there won’t be new jobs that open up for them along the way. This will very decidedly not be a replay of the Industrial Revolution. What’s worse, it will all happen so slowly that we’re going to spend a long time denying what’s unfolding before our eyes, and a whole lot of people are going to suffer because of it.

In fact, I think automation has been affecting our economy in nontraditional ways since about 2000 or so. Only by a tiny amount, though, which means it’s impossible to demonstrate its impact conclusively. Still, you can amass evidence, and that’s what I do. There may be other explanations for each of the trends I talk about, but when you put them all together I think the simplest collective explanation is that they point in the direction of automation already having a slight effect on employment and capital intensity. Slight but growing. Two or three decades from now, the Warren Buffetts of the world will own all the robots and a big chunk of the world will be permanently unemployed.

Do I prove this? Not by a mile. But in the end, I meant for this piece to be read as provocation more than anything else. So go ahead and be provoked, one way or the other. Click the link.

Alex Koppelman takes a fresh look at the Benghazi affair this weekend and tries to come up with something outrageous about it. He doesn’t, really, until he gets to the very end. So what is it that he finds most outrageous? Not, it turns out, the poor security in Benghazi; nor the military response to the attacks; nor even the editing of the infamous talking points. Not really. He pinpoints the outrage much more precisely, and I think it’s instructive to read what he says:

This past November (after Election Day), White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters that “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Remarkably, Carney is sticking with that line even now….This is an incredible thing for Carney to be saying. He’s playing semantic games, telling a roomful of journalists that the definition of editing we’ve all been using is wrong, that the only thing that matters is who’s actually working the keyboard. It’s not quite re-defining the word “is,” or the phrase “sexual relations,” but it’s not all that far off, either.

If Benghazi continues to have legs, it won’t be because Fox is hyping it. They’ve been hyping it for eight months now. It won’t be because the initial talking points were wrong. We’ve known that since the end of last September. It won’t be because there were military assets on the night of the attacks that could have been used but weren’t. This is the “stand down” conspiracy theory, which keeps morphing into something new whenever the old version is debunked, and it’s long since been thoroughly hashed out. It won’t be because references to al-Qaeda were removed from the final draft of the talking points. David Petraeus explained that last November. And it won’t be because we learned that the editing of the talking points involved some squabbling between State and CIA. Nobody over the age of five is surprised or scandalized by that.

No, it will be because the small group of reporters who are credentialed to the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room feels aggrieved that the press secretary told them something to their faces that concealed a bit of unseemly bureaucratic squabbling. It doesn’t matter if the subject matter itself was important. In this case, it wasn’t: the nickel version is that the State Department objected to the CIA adding a sentence making sure everyone knew they had warned about possible attacks beforehand, a statement that was both gratuitous and off subject. But trivial or not, Carney misled the reporters in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room about this, and that makes it personal.

Never underestimate the power of a press corps that suddenly decides the story is personal. It may be a while before they let go of this.

Here’s the thing that really puzzles me about this whole business of the IRS targeting tea party groups for extra scrutiny: the agency’s clumsy handling of the whole thing. And I’m being charitable by calling it “clumsy.” I mean, did they really think they could just announce this during an ABA conference on Friday morning and that would be the end of it? Of course not. It’s explosive. So why were they seemingly so unprepared for any followup questions?

It’s very peculiar. Especially since the evidence suggests this affair probably wasn’t quite as outrageous as it seems at first glance. Roughly speaking, what seems to have happened is that three years ago the IRS was facing an explosion of newly formed 501(c)4 groups claiming tax exempt status, something that’s legal only for groups that are primarily engaged in promoting education or social welfare, not electioneering. So some folks in the Cincinnati office tried to come up with a quick filter to flag groups that deserved extra scrutiny. But what should that flag be? Well, three years ago the explosion happened to be among tea party groups, so they began searching their database “for applications with ‘Tea Party,’ ‘Patriots,’ or ‘9/12’ in the organization’s name as well as other ‘political sounding’ names.” This was dumb, and when senior leaders found out about it, they put a quick stop to it:

On June 29, 2011, Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, learned at a meeting that groups were being targeted, according to the [inspector general’s] report….Lerner instructed agents to change the criteria for flagging groups “immediately,” the report says.

The problem is that the explosion of 501(c)4 groups is a genuine problem: they really have grown like kudzu, lots of them really are used primarily as electioneering vehicles, and the IRS has been either unwilling or unable to regulate them properly. So the fact that some of the folks responsible for processing these applications were looking for a way to flag potentially dubious groups is sort of understandable.

But understandable or not, they bungled it horribly, leaving themselves open to equally understandable charges of politicizing the IRS. Conservative groups are as outraged as liberals would be if the Bush-era IRS were flagging groups with “environment” or “progressive” in their names. So even if, as seems likely, this whole thing turns out to have been mostly a misguided scheme cooked up by some too-clever IRS drones, it doesn’t matter. Conservatives are right to be outraged and right to demand a full investigation. They suspect there might be more to it, and so would I if the shoe were on the other foot. We need to find out for sure whether this episode was just moronic, or if it had some kind of partisan motivation.

What’s really unfortunate about all this is that it will probably put an end to any scrutiny of 501(c)4 groups, and that’s a shame. The IRS should be scrutinizing them, and it should be doing it on an ongoing basis. More than likely, though, Congress will step in to neuter them completely on this score, and the current Wild West character of 501(c)4 fundraising will continue unabated.

Happy Mother’s Day! What better way to celebrate than to post a picture of my mother’s cats? These are the two sibs, Tillamook and Ditto, claiming dibs on my mother’s favorite chair. Because, after all, Mother’s Day goes just so far, right?

Earlier today, my basic take on the Benghazi talking points was that they exposed some “unseemly bureaucratic squabbling combined with the usual mushiness that you get when an interagency process produces a series of drafts of sensitive information for public consumption.” Glenn Kessler has more on this:

This basically was a bureaucratic knife fight, pitting the State Department against the CIA.

….First, some important context: Although the ambassador was killed, the Benghazi “consulate” was not a consulate at all but basically a secret CIA operation which included an effort to round up shoulder-launched missiles. In fact, only seven of the 30 Americans evacuated from Benghazi had any connection to the State Department; the rest were affiliated with the CIA….So, from the State Department perspective, this was an attack on a CIA operation.

….The talking points were originally developed by the CIA….[and clearly imply] that State screwed up, even though internally, it was known that this was a CIA operation. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland especially objects to the reference to previous warnings, saying it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings.”

….The final version of the talking points shows what happened: Just about everything was cut, leaving virtually nothing. The reference to “consulate” was also deleted, replaced by “diplomatic post.” From a bureaucratic perspective, it may have seemed like the best possible solution at the time. From a political perspective, it turned out to be a disaster.

I think this sounds almost certainly right: in a set of talking points that was supposed to be about what happened, CIA tried to add a paragraph that deflected blame for the debacle elsewhere. State objected since they considered this a CIA operation in the first place. Read the whole thing for Kessler’s full explanation. And see David Corn here for his take on why today’s news is bad for the White House even though the substance is thin: “This is not much of cover-up. There is no evidence the White House is hiding the truth about what occurred in Benghazi….But the White House has indeed been caught not telling the full story.”

As you can see, Domino is quite enjoying our 400 ppm world. She was rolling around in the sunshine yesterday while Marian pulled a few weeds, and then a dog walked by. This very much got her attention. She’s OK with 400 ppm, but not so much with dogs.

Need more cats? Or, more accurately, do you need more cat? Click here for video proof that big cats like boxes every bit as much as your average housecat likes them.